A Show at Art Basel Hong Kong Revisits History to Interpret Today
As he pored over old news archives, the painter Chow Chun Fai was trying to work out what could be said about a transformed Hong Kong.
His exhibition, 'Interview the Interviewer II,' is the second installment in several years of collaboration with Sharon Cheung, a former television journalist, who covered diplomatic news from 1995 to 2004 before setting up her namesake art space, SC Gallery. It will be displayed in March in the Insight sector at Art Basel Hong Kong.
The exhibition revisits scenes of her reporting, from the White House lawn to a Harvard auditorium where Chinese leaders gave speeches. It also includes the official moment when Hong Kong was handed over to China from the British. The paintings re-examine Hong Kong's tumultuous political transformation in recent years, and as it finds itself increasingly caught in the middle of tense U.S.-China relations. The exhibition revisits scenes of Cheung's reporting, including the White House lawn. Credit... Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
'Looking to history does not necessarily provide a clear answer, but it gives people an opportunity to reinterpret memory,' said Chris Wan Feng, the curator of the exhibition. 'Art can help us understand from a more personal point of view, rather than an institutional one.'
Cheung's journalism career began before Hong Kong, a former British colony, was returned to China in 1997. Over the next decade, she traveled the world covering diplomatic news. Locally, she gained fame as the Hong Kong reporter whose dogged questioning so annoyed the former Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, that he rebuked her as 'too simple, sometimes naïve' in an extended rant captured on the air.
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